Lust for Life

This is a post for the Tenth Daughter of Memory.

She was a flower-killer.

A saviour, a prophet, and a fighter.
A flash across the sky that you doubted you ever saw.
The girl next door that had a penchant for axes, with the lumberjack father from the forget-me-not state.
From the home of the gods where the air was thinner.
Something about her didn’t quite add up; the sugar and spice and all things slightly poisonous. If it was an act, no one could tell. But real life was far more brutal than any playwright could convey. And everyone knows the leading role will be struck down eventually.
And if she didn’t die at the hands of her lovers, surely exposure would get her up that high. After all, a more appropriate cliché would be that life is a battlefield.
No amount of enlightenment or fortune cookies could solve the puzzle that she embodied.

In some stories she might have played only a minor role; the victim or the killer, take your pick.

But in this story, she has no choice but to be imposing; victim or killer.

Quickly changeable and sometimes in no certain or sensible order.
Perhaps the countdown should have given it all away. The white horses left at a gallop that day. Every little fight with her was simply a dress rehearsal for how it would all end. The well-read, innocent ones always turn out to be the most twisted, after all.
Maybe she cracked when she realised that life on earth could never quite measure up to her ethereal ideas of perfection; if you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em.

And when she couldn’t just sit there swaying in the wind any longer, she uprooted herself and swore to change things. ‘Cause when you can’t get no satisfaction from what you’ve got, you’re bound to go hunting. And hunting was something she just happened to be missing. It became clearer when she substituted her tea and toast for tea and cigarettes for breakfast.

She started to lose her morals; stealing from the poor in spirit was no worse than stealing from the rich. It’s easier to lose conscience and consciousness without sustenance and with vodka.
And when you’re amoral and drunk on anger, there’s no stopping the fire breathing monster. Every asshole’s out to get you when you’ve misplaced your mind and let your emotions take over.
And so the obscenities came out.
The nursery character cum The Bride.
She portrayed the chaos of the three days lost. The carnage that ensued, and the knowledge that led to death.

The anger, violence, sex; all the immorality escalated faster than the amount of inane poetry on the internet.
The love letters went out the window and she fired at herself and others at random. Her lips lied in some ways but spoke truth in others.
She didn’t answer the knocking at the door because she was far too entwined in other activities. The target was on her but she was too loud and angry to notice.
She’d been afraid of what might have happened had she been born attractive, had the celestial beings burdened her with beauty. But the way things had begun hurtling along, there wasn’t much chance it could have been any stormier had she been born gorgeous.

The friends she didn’t believe existed began shouting the truth at her, but everything bounced off and she screamed back.

At least some of her sins had been legalised in the eyes of the state a few years ago.

As her hatred spread, so did the rumours.
The knocking persisted, but the mental and emotional starvation to which she subjected herself rendered her senses less than perfect.
It didn’t matter to her that the second draft of her nature might not have fit what The Heavenly Being might have planned.
Poseidon might have had power over the mermaids, but her God was far away and she didn’t recognise his voice.

She was a patriot to nothing in the cruel world she found herself in.
He hadn’t come back for people like her, she was sure of that.

And now that she’d let herself become an animal, she felt there was no going back.
She’d become everything she’d been terrified of on those hazy nights that people were assigned to ‘look after her.’
Adam and Eve had cursed her, after all; how could she resist temptation when they’d already fired the fatal bullets?
She was dead already anyway; what was a little adultery going to do?
The two-faced serpent’s deception was clearly working then.
But the lies were the only thing that stopped the ache.
She was bruising herself over and over again; not for pleasure, but just so she could feel something. The guardians watched over her and shook their heads; they’d seen this all before.

The signs became more obvious, more violent, more out of place, and yet she ignored them. Every little crime she committed was like a kick in the face of her God.
But even Hercules could no longer hold her back.
She was in too deep to notice those in close proximity of her were assembling themselves for an intervention. Too caught up in her own ideas of excitement and pleasure to mind that she was wrong in the eyes of her God.
Maybe if she’d seen his face in human form and the pain in his eyes, she’d understand.
Maybe if she had visited the grave and wept in the days following.
Maybe she could have seen it all anyway if she hadn’t been out flirting with death.
But she’d been forever stopping and starting in her walk towards life.
She’d always promised that one day it would be alright, one day she would make it right; but now any chance of a future was being blown to pieces.
She couldn’t stand being wrong, so what difference was it if she was completely twisted?
And so she sealed her own fate, trading the double edged sword for a knife that wouldn’t stand a chance.
Oil and water could never mix, and so the oil made way for more water.
All the while, her scaly friend edging her on.
All her premeditated sins began to worry her even less, they became just like the accidental crimes.
She cried out and wondered why she wasn’t being saved, when her troubles were staring her in the face all along.
Blindly, she continued to chase desires of the flesh.

The less successful she became at blocking out her guilt, the more she filled herself with to forget.
The doors to Valhalla were closing and she was running out of time.
The kingdom that had been prepared for her was now preparing to turn her away.
Too much life, too much ecstasy, too much earth was pulling her away from the heavens.

She was a flower killer.

The walking dead were waiting for a saviour.
It made no sense that she would trade in eternity for meaningless nights of writhing and sweat just to take off the edge.
It was a vicious cycle that could be broken if only she just cleaned out her ears and answered the fucking door.

With each harmful act she lost her religion.
And just as in Act One, Scene Three, her father cried for his lost daughter, and the one that had stolen her away.
But when she finally opened the door and shouted no, everything fell to pieces.
She became the reference to the fallen angel in obscure lines scrawled down by a poet drunk on wine and life.

And then it was showtime.

The weeds finally took a stranglehold on God’s roses, squeezing the life from their stems.
All the time spent rehearsing her apology was about to be shown as waste of precious time that could have been used begging for forgiveness a lot earlier on.
But finally, she was the star of the show.
This though, it wasn’t an act, and there wasn’t anything to break her fall onto the stage when she jumped.

“Sometimes I think I just need to take a bullet to the brain,” she slurred at the blurry figure in front of her.
The nearby church bells echoed three times as the witching hour fell upon them.
“Hey, come on, now” he scolded her as he tried his best to hold up the dejected, confused mess.
She mumbled something else as she collapsed onto his shoulder, “Seriously! You don’t mean that!” he yelled at her, scared to see her in such an unfamiliar state.

He tried to pick her up, but she protested until he took off his jersey and tied it around her waist to protect the dignity she mistakenly thought she still had while he carried her on his back.
The legs he’d so often traced with his eyes right up to the hem of her skirt were now wrapped around his waist.
He had a feeling that she’d need a grand display of love from the One up above for her to change back at all now.

He puzzled over what could have caused her rapid descent and crash into flames.
If the coke and sweat were anything to go by, adrenaline and fear fuelled her.

She used to have the kind of soul and body that would cause empires to fall to their knees, but her doubt and loneliness consumed her.

She bit and sucked his neck as he struggled up the hill, and even though she sent shivers down his spine he knew staying with her would be like taking a direct hit.

“You ever wonder what it’d be like to be on the same side of the wall as me at night?” she tried to whisper the words in a sultry way, but the overwhelming smell of spirits on her tongue made him turn his head away.
“You ever wonder what those guys talk about after their through with you?” he hissed back, forcefully jumping her further up his back as she began to slip.
“You’re hurting me,” she whimpered as they passed a concerned looking group of bystanders; clearly her approach wasn’t working as well as she’d planned for.
He considered dropping her outside the church at the bottom of the hill, but then even the priest might be tempted to rid the world of this disgrace of a girl.

Her soft lips kissed his neck again and he hoisted her up a little as he struggled up the steps.
“I want you,” the words dripped from her once innocent bubblegum lips.
His blood froze for a split second as the words reached him; clearly in her state she couldn’t care less about second date rules.

Whatever boat was meant to save her had clearly set sail long ago.
She tugged his hair gently and rested her head on his shoulder while his fingers tightened around her thighs.
Had she not been so drunk, he would have had to consider tranquillising her once he finally managed to get her home to avoid her desperate hands.
At least he knew he wouldn’t have to listen to her with someone else for another night in a row.

He had to let her down at the top of the hill, to give his legs and back a break, then subsequently helped her adjust her shirt to further protect her from any watching eyes.
“I set a church on fire once.”
“You’re a crazy bitch, you know that, right?” he pulled her hand towards the house.
She laughed drunkenly, “You know you should stay with me tonight, right?”

He fumbled with the keys and opened the front door, “You know that’s not going to end well.”
She tried and failed to maintain a sense of grace and sensuality as she fell through the front door, but she was no prima donna that night.
The amount of whisky in her system was enough for her to remember next to nothing in the morning, but at least she’d live even if she weren’t able to retell the tale.

He couldn’t even imagine the pain she was going to feel in her head the next day.
He drew her curtains once he opened her door, knowing that the slightest slither of sunlight would induce even more aching in the morning.

As he stepped back from the window her hands wrapped around his body from behind him, and moved down past his stomach.
He slipped out from her embrace quicker that her hazy mind could comprehend or register.

She looked confused, and he gestured to the thick, heavy book on her shelf, “What happened to you?”

She blinked for a moment then spun around angrily, knocking a three-quarter empty bottle of wine off her dresser, hardly even noticing it smash on the floor.
“Society happened to me,” she slurred.
“Life happened to me. Brazilians happened to me. Men happened to me. Sex happened to me.”

She gestured to the bottles on her dresser, “Temptation happened to me.”

She was a flower killer.